Off to Berlin: recommendations...?

[GroupC]

kids running and playing in the streets in bare feet as most could not afford shoes.

This is why I'm going... it feels like home when I was a child!

Thanks to all who suggested places to go. I've been to some of them before but will be going to most, if not all, of them again - notably Treptower Park, TV tower, Bundestag possibly, etc etc. I love my Eastern European stuff. Must be the hidden Marxist in me (hidden?). I'll be going to the technical museum for the first time which will be a highlight I'm sure and there are lots of suggestions which maty/will be taken up.

If I could resuggest places I went before, to myself and people who may be going, I'd also recommend to myself / them the Stasi museum, Topography of Terror, any bits of the wall that aren't touristified (there are /were some if you look hard enough), Gleinicke Bridge (the bridge of spies), the place where lots of WW2 executions took place (can't remember the name now but it was chilling), and so on.

Only a week and a bit to go!

[GroupC]

"may" not "maty" obviously there. Without political prejudice in any way, despite my mention of Marxism.

[Railwaygun]

the Stasi museum is great but creepy - they have a bugged tree - for monitoring clandestine meetings in forests!!

You always know when you are in (former) E Berlin - they kept all their trams!

[railsquid]

You do have to pre-book the Reischtag but it is well worth a visit.  The view from the top dome over Berlin is amazing.

Be careful, the Germans get a bit upset if you call it the Reichstag these days, I think it's now called the Bundestag 

No-one will get upset - the building is the Reichstag, seat of the Bundestag.

https://www.bundestag.de/besuche/architektur/reichstag

[railsquid]

I remember going to Zeiss Jena in East Germany immediately after the reunification and going through East Berlin.

My abiding memory was seeing the kids running and playing in the streets in bare feet as most could not afford shoes.

I would be interested to see photographic evidence of that, as it does not match with my memories of East Berlin immediately after reunification. The place was poor by Western standards, but certainly not poverty-stricken.

[railsquid]

You always know when you are in (former) E Berlin - they kept all their trams!

Continuing my full-on Berlin pedant mode (well I spent all those years living there, might as well get some use out of them ) a couple of lines have been extended into the former West (though the majority of the network is still in the East).